Click… Click… DONE!!!

After two years, I have finished the first rough draft of my novel. My wife’s already read through it all, thinks it stands a chance of not stinking and is already egging me on to start the first re-write.

The final totals:

words: 197,000
pages : 378

I hope to be done with my first revision by mid-August, so the wife can read and opinion it before she goes back to school. Then, I’ll start harassing my friends to read it before I send it out to be rejected!

Blah…

I’m getting a new job in the next couple of weeks. Going to be moving across the aisle to another department. With it comes the chance of making more money (Yay! Commission Sales!) and full time.

The sucky thing is that they won’t give me full time benefits until about January. Damn thieving bastards.

The New Harry Potter movie…

…I thought was pretty good. I’m grateful that the people making these movies have finally realized that you can’t shove everything from the book into film. The plot structure is fairly concise and doesn’t ramble along like the first two movies. The characters are more solid than I’ve seen in the previous movies. They take their time fleshing out the slow moments while the action sequence zoom along at a speedy clip.

Altogether, I don’t think this movie (or any of the Potter movies, for that matter) will go down in the panthenon of great movies. Though, I think they might make the list of good fantasy movies.

The real thriller is the book coming out later this month. I’ve been rereading some of the books in order to get caught up again. The wife and I are actually going to go to the Potter Party at B&N. She’s going as Snape. I think I’ll go as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. It’s sort of hard to figure out which wizard to impersonate while having a bald head and not having the resources to buy a wig.

The end of an era

I first bought my own internet the summer of 2004. It was with netzero and the dial up speed worked perfectly for my email checking and band booking needs. That also happened to coincide with my hooking up with my future wife.

My internet usage soon evolved far beyond simple email and band needs. I had found games.

Games are to M@ what heroine was to Burroughs. I love games. They don’t have to be supercompetitive. In fact, the more inane, the better.

All was fine and dandy as long as I had dial up. The frustration at the slow speed usually kept my addiction in check.

Then came my foray into highspeed internet. A 256k connection may not be considered blazing fast, but compared to the 56k dial up, it zoomed. Now I could finally watch youtube videos without much delay. I could listen to mp3s. And most importantly, I could play flash games. Not very fast, mind you, but fast enough to get by.

My writing has suffered. So has my guitar playing. Even my sleep suffered. My wife, especially, has suffered. She suffered patiently enough, enduring half conversations of mono-syllabic answers to questions I never really heard. She pleaded to leave the house, to go for walks or bike rides, hiking or swimming only to hear, “I’m almost done with this round.”

Well, I finally finished the round. Using a minor budgetary snag as the major excuse, we canceled our internet. Though we had a couple weeks left, I didn’t know enough to let the devil alone. I found a new game called tower defense, which proved to be more addictive than simcity, my previous electronic crack.

So, some time last week, I cut the cord. Honestly, at about 3 am, I pulled out the wire cutters and severed the ethernet cord.

True, I’m more cut off from the world. But I still have internet access at work and the library. In the first day of freedom, I actually cleaned up my office. I haven’t written much more, but I have practiced my guitar, gone swimming, bicycling, and running.

Hell, I even spent more time with my wife. Which is the most important thing.